


You can't kill their spirit

by HelloPotato



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/F, loosely based on the movie 'All Cheerleaders Die', warnings in notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-05-12
Packaged: 2018-10-31 00:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10888395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloPotato/pseuds/HelloPotato
Summary: Gansey’s got a brain too, but not much common sense. That’s the only excuse for her excitement, glasses slipping down her nose and hair artfully dishevelled as she expounds upon her idea for what Ronnie calls “the shitty plot of every horror movie ever”.Addie hums in agreement. “Local girls murdered for trying to solve years-old case of missing teenage boy.”“Teen girls wind up six feet under after thinking they could do a better job than local police”, Blue contributes. Even though they probably could do better. It wouldn’t be hard.





	You can't kill their spirit

**Author's Note:**

> See end notes for detailed warnings. Stay safe :)

Looking back, Ronnie wonders whether she can pinpoint the exact moment that her life went to shit.

Maybe it started with her father’s murder. Finding his body in the garage with his head bashed in, blood dribbling through the cracks in the cement. She can still remember the smell of it, metallic and meaty, like when Niall Lynch butchered one of their sheep, mixed in with gasoline and the lavender that her mother had just finished planting. Objectively, finding your dad’s brains splattered across the driveway is sort of a life-ruining event. It has all the makings of a psychiatrist’s nightmare- or daydream, maybe, who knows where shrinks get their kicks. Ronnie’s hadn’t seemed to enjoy their sessions very much.

Of course, it could have been something else that tipped the scales. She isn’t exactly spoiled for choice. Maybe it was when her mum stopped laughing, and stopped hearing her when she spoke, and stopped really being a mum at all. Maybe it was the day that they put her in a home. Or when she started fighting with Declan and never found a way to stop. Drinking. Fighting. Kavinsky. Maybe it was finding Noah’s body.

But if she has to pick a time, Ronnie figures it was probably the night that she died.

-

Addison is used to being apprehensive. It’s almost her resting point, the sick pounding of her heart and the familiar clenching of her stomach. The waiting that accompanies it. She knows the feeling as well as she knows the insides of a car.

So she isn’t apprehensive, exactly, sitting in a booth at Nino’s diner and watching Blue and Gansey square off for the first time. Even if Gansey is being charming and clueless and generally offensive, her white teeth and tanned skin almost at odds with the peeling vinyl seats and dusty windows. Even if Blue looks dangerously close to smacking her with one of the laminated menus that she has tucked under her arm.

Addie tips her glass back and lets one of the melting ice cubes slide into her mouth, crunching on it half-heartedly in an attempt to block out Blue and Gansey squabbling, and the itchy feeling of Ronnie sitting pressed against her side.

It is too hot for anybody to be sitting so close together. She can feel her face slowly turning red ( _from the heat_ , she muses) and knows that her arm must be uncomfortably damp where it rests against Ronnie’s. She should really ask Ronnie to move, maybe crack a joke about her trying to hide behind Addie to avoid catching Blue’s attention. Should casually slide across the seat and put a few inches between their thighs. But she doesn’t, because she is tired, and she has four hours at work and three chapters of reading to finish before she can even think about going to bed. If Ronnie is hot then she can just say so. 

Ronnie catches her eye when Blue’s voice rises enough to make the other customers in the diner wince, mouth twisting into a smirk that invites Addie to laugh along with her at Gansey as she flounders.

-

Dating Blue was like being given the chance to live somebody else’s life for a little while. In her memories, the good days were filled with soft summer sunlight and neon green fishnets. She remembers the feeling of Blue’s fingers in her hair, of lying with her eyes closed and her head resting in Blue’s lap. More than that she remembers the giddy warmth that came with being _liked_ by somebody, and having the knowledge that Blue cared about her, even though her shirt was stained with machine oil and fading yellow splotches still marched their way down one of her legs. 

She hadn’t quite known what to do with somebody who cared, except to try and keep her for as long as she could. Whenever Addie looks back on that summer, faded and dreamlike, she just thinks that she’s lucky that Blue forgave her for the bad days enough to still be her friend.

She still isn’t quite sure what to do with the fact that she is cared for.

-

To say she’s surprised, the first time that Ronnie does anything but laugh when she eats dirt trying out a new move, would be a serious understatement. She stares at the hand offered to her, the nails bitten down and the skin smooth and brown except for where it’s not, on the underside of her forearms.

Fingers clicking obnoxiously in front of her nose snap her out of her daze. Addie reaches up and clasps Ronnie’s hand, trying not to enjoy the obvious strength that Ronnie uses to pull her upright. They stand for a moment, hands still tangled, both a little bit breathless (Addie from landing on compact earth, and Ronnie for reasons that she doesn’t have the time or energy to think about). Ronnie steps away first and drops her hand. It takes a few minutes for her skin to stop prickling.

-

Addie is the smartest idiot that Blue knows. It isn’t just that her test scores could run circles around Blue’s, although they certainly can. Addie is sharp, and driven, and stubborn to the point where it’s almost dangerous. The only thing bigger than her brain is her ambition.

She’s just not convinced that Addie thought her new choice of friends through.

If there is one thing that she and Addie have in common, or at least _had_ in common, it’s their shared distain for people like Rachel Gansey the Third. People with shiny cars and money to spend, and perfectly symmetrical faces as if the universe hadn’t already given them enough. Gansey sighs and condescends and knots her stupid cashmere sweater around her shoulders with no consideration for Blue, who has to be seen in public with her.

She has no idea what Addie sees in her, except for the fact that Addie is, at heart, a bit of a nerd, and Gansey undeniably is also. The evidence of this is in the stacks books that wobble on her desk, and the maps covered in what has to be her handwriting, it’s so elegant and unnecessary.

Gansey’s got a brain too, but not much common sense. That’s the only excuse for her excitement, glasses slipping down her nose and hair artfully dishevelled as she expounds upon her idea for what Ronnie calls “the shitty plot of every horror movie ever”.

Addie hums in agreement. “Local girls murdered for trying to solve years-old case of missing teenage boy.”

“Teen girls wind up six feet under after thinking they could do a better job than local police”, Blue contributes. Even though they probably could do better. It wouldn’t be hard.

Ronnie sniggers. It sounds mean, but Ronnie looks a little mean today, straddling a chair and scuffing heavy boots on the floor. She must have shaved her head recently, or gotten Gansey to do it for her, because it’s short and even instead of patchy.  

“Either that or the guy just skipped town.” Ronnie points out. “This place is enough to run anyone out.” She might mean that in general, Blue knows, or she might mean Addie. Sometimes Blue thinks that Ronnie is going to bite through her own tongue holding back all of the things that she isn’t cruel enough to say.

Gansey sighs. It’s a very good sigh, world-weary and just exasperated to make people like Addie, who possesses some degree of manners, feel a bit guilty. 

“Here are the facts we know: Noah Czerny, seventeen years old. Left home around four o’clock in the afternoon, never came back. His parents thought he was sleeping over at a friend’s place and waited until the next day to call the cops. Car found abandoned in backroads south of town.” Gansey looks at them over the top of her glasses, and Blue suppresses the urge to push them back into place. “Their only suspect was his friend, and they cleared him almost immediately.”

“Please don’t tell me you actually want to go around questioning people”, Addie groans, knowing that this is indeed what Gansey is suggesting. “What do you want us to do, stake out the friend’s house?”

Gansey shrugs.

“Come on”, Ronnie drawls, “as if he still lives here. He probably packed up the moment the police were done with him.”

“Because he’s guilty?” Blue asks.

“Because everyone thought he was.”

Gansey shifts a bit in a way that Blue finds incredibly suspicious. She shuffles her notes and avoids Blue’s eyes.

“I wasn’t suggesting a stake-out, no. I doubt we’d be very good at it. Just…”

“Just what, Gansey?” Now Addie is suspicious as well.

“I _thought_ ”, Gansey continues, still shuffling, “that we could just talk to him after class.”

-

She could ask Addie what the hell she is thinking, adding cheerleading to her already overloaded schedule. But she remembers how Addie’s face had been so carefully blank after her visit with the guidance counsellor, how unfairly tired she looked after he told her that perfect grades at a school like theirs wouldn’t make Harvard or Yale want her. Not when she hadn’t so much as played a sport or acted in a play, hadn’t done anything to boost her transcript. Never mind the fact that she’s been working multiple jobs for longer than she can legally admit to.

Calla, at some point in her mysterious past, engaged in a sport that required being bendy and dangling from the ceiling. She finds Addie amusing, and Addie finds her off-putting, but she agrees to help Addie learn how to throw herself into the air, and how to let her hands leave the ground and trust that her feet will find their way back underneath her.

It isn’t a complete disaster.

-

Watching Blue and Gansey laughing together doesn’t make her jealous, except for the fact that it kind of does.

_It’s not even about Gansey liking Blue_ , she thinks, ripping up handfuls of grass. _It’s both of them._

Addie has reached a point in her life where she can admit that she resents Gansey. She loves her too, so the resentment settles uncomfortably inside her and tastes bitter in her mouth. But she resents Gansey for her money, for her effortless poise, for the way that people flock to her. It isn’t entirely a fair thing to think, Addie knows, because Gansey is more alone and more afraid than she will ever let on. Given her track record when it came to other people, Addie is surprised that she’d even noticed it. She thought that she was able to only because it was such an achingly familiar concept.

She is jealous of Blue too, though it is a quieter, subtler thing.  It’s even more unfair than being resentful of Gansey; Addie is jealous of her because, even if they both struggle for money, Blue has a family who loves her; she is jealous of Blue for being unapologetically herself, even though she knows that Blue fought for that confidence, has fought to use the right bathroom and be seen the right way.

Jealously is never rational.

_One thing I’m not jealous of_ , she thinks, _is Blue’s reaction when she realises that she has a crush on a WASP._

-

Nobody knows exactly why Ronnie Lynch joined the cheerleading team, only that it had something to do with Rachel ‘Please, call me Gansey’ Gansey. Most people don’t even question it, too put off by her foul mouth and fouler temper to bother asking. They are just grateful that she is too small to go at the bottom of the pyramid, because nobody trusts her to stop them from falling.

Henry asked once why Ronnie bothered to show up to practise with split knuckles and a bad attitude.

“For the grass stains”, had been the sneered reply. “Why the fuck else?”

Such stunning wit aside, Henry found that she was content with her decision to sign up for the debate team instead.

-

Blue expects to feel defensive, when Gansey shows up to ply her mother with questions and charm. She had when she first suggested asking her mother for insight, had flushed angrily at the derisive snort that Ronnie hadn’t bothered trying to keep in.

She’s used to being the freak. The psychic’s daughter. A little circle in a world made for squares. She doesn’t care what assholes like Veronica Lynch think about her family.

But Gansey is perfectly polite. Actually, she is interested, which is better than polite in Blue’s opinion. People are normally polite because they’re humouring you.

Maura putters around the kitchen, throwing pinches of this herb and that into a pot that is bubbling ominously on the stove. She and Blue keep up a light-hearted conversation to cover the fact that Gansey is unusually silent, and has been since Maura had shaken her head sadly and told them “I don’t think he’s still around, poor boy. At least, not the way you’re asking. Not in the living kind of way.”

Maura scoops a ladleful of what she optimistically called “tea” into a glass and passes it over to Gansey.

“This’ll make you perk up a bit.” Gansey’s smile is small, but she takes it with murmured “thank you ma’am.”

She looks pretty miserable. Blue is probably a horrible person for letting her drink it anyway.

-

Gansey waits until they are in her car to complain.

“I think it burned away all the skin in my nose!” Blue scoffs.

“How would that even work?”            

Gansey shoves her gently. “I don’t know, ask my nostrils. Hey, stop laughing-!”

-

Addison Parrish lives above a church. Specifically, the church where Ronnie spends every Sunday, glad for the bike shorts she wears beneath her dress as she kneels and stands and kneels again, mouthing the words of hymn after hymn. Ronnie finds the fact of Addie’s whereabouts distracting, especially whenever she has to make small talk with the little elderly ladies who like to pat her hand and ask after her boyfriend ( _because you can’t tell me that a pretty thing like you doesn’t have a boy or two in her life!_ ).

If only her classmates could see her as she politely gritted her teeth, abstaining from kicking even the stuffiest of them in the shins. Her teachers would probably faint from the shock.

At least afterwards she can sneak upstairs and annoy Parrish until she either gives up studying or threatens to kick Ronnie out.

-

Afterwards, she is surprised by how right she still feels, sitting in the wooden pews between her brothers. You’d think being dead would have changed that.

Or maybe she never really felt all that welcome even before everything happened, and now she can’t tell the difference. People like her rarely are welcome in this sort of place.

She wonders what He is judging her for, if He is judging her at all. He probably has better things to do with his time. Books to read. Arcs to build. Whatever.

-

When they feel like joking about it, Ronnie loudly declares that it is all Gansey and Blue’s fault.

“After all, who the fuck goes for a romantic stroll through an overgrown churchyard in the middle of an abandoned property?”

“Where’s the sympathy?” Gansey complains. “You’re not the one who put your foot through somebody’s ribcage!”

“Then shouldn’t we should feel bad for them, not you?” Addie jokes. “Having your ugly foot crushing them can’t have been very fun.”

They’re joking to cover up how awful it was, looking at the dented skull of a boy no older than them, rummaging through rotting pockets for any ID.

“It was a good picture.” Ronnie says. “He looked like a fun guy.” She’s standing over the sink, using a paper towel to wipe away crusted blood. Addie watches her struggle for a moment before standing to help, wincing at the pull of muscles that don’t yet know they’re still allowed to keep moving. She takes the damp towel from Ronnie, and Ronnie lets her.

Ronnie turns to face her, so that there’s barely any space between them. Addie’s heart, newly restarted, beats faster at the heat she can feel coming from Ronnie (and her brain dimly registers that it’s a miracle any of them are warm at all, because corpses aren’t warm). 

She touches her fingers gently to Ronnie’s chin and uses them to tilt her head slightly upwards, so that more light falls on Ronnie’s dirty face. She flinches a bit and grumbles, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Jesus, this is like the worst hangover ever.”

-

They joke about it later, but at the time Blue is sobbing, stumbling in the shallow water and struggling to pull Addie’s body onto the bank. She’s pale and cold, and her eyes are so empty that it makes Blue retch.

Ronnie is beside her. Blue could only manage to drag her torso out of the water, so her legs are still partially submerged. Ronnie’s not pale like Addie is pale; she’s tacky with blood and it shines in the moonlight. The cut on her head has nothing left to bleed, but it’s pretty clear that she didn’t make it into the water alive. Maybe that’s for the best.

Gansey is the hardest to find, because she’s light enough that the river carried her a way downstream. But Blue drags her out as well, lays her down gently beside the others and brushes her damp hair away from her forehead.

She doesn’t think about what will happen if this doesn’t work. She just tips the contents of her bag onto the ground, rummaging through pencils and scraps of paper until she finds a small drawstring pouch. The stones inside are smooth and translucent, glittering different colours in the feeble light provided by her bike lamp.

They don’t look like enough, but she gets to work anyway. She rests the blue one in Gansey’s outstretched palm, folds Addie’s fingers gently around the green one. She has to lift Ronnie’s arm out of the water to tuck the red one safely into her hand, clumsily manipulating her fist closed. Blue fights the bile that rises in her throat at the limp way that Ronnie’s arm moves.

She takes the last one for herself, a purple stone that looks soft and calm. She doesn’t feel very calm, and her hands are shaking as she lights the candles. Blue barely feels the cut that she makes in her palm, squeezing her fist until blood drips onto the sand. She can see it winding its way in little rivulets down to Ronnie, to Gansey, to Addie, and draws in a shuddering breath.

She starts to chant.

-

It’s a tradition, at Number 3 Fox Way, to name a plant after someone you care about.

“When it’s looking a little dry”, Maura tells her, “you should water it and then check on your friend. They may be feeling a bit tired. And if it’s looking wilted, then they may be stressed or angry.”

“This feels a bit voyeuristic” Blue says, kneeling and resting her chin on her folded arms so that she and Ronnie 2.0 (alias ‘dickhead’) are level.

Now Blue can’t even comprehend what would have happened, if she hadn’t felt the urge to check on them in the middle of the night and found them all dead, their leaves black and crumbling.

She can’t remember how she got out of the house without waking one of its countless occupants, or how she knew where to go. The bike ride there is a blur. She knows she cried. She knows she fell a couple of times, knees stinging and gravel embedded in her palms.

And then she has to call Orla, once she’s found them, has to scramble up the bank to the road and walk to the nearest emergency payphone.

Apparently, she looks a little bit upset, because Orla doesn’t complain at being woken up so early, or at having to carry several bodies up from the river to her car. She doesn’t even complain about the blood and silt and filth that they get on her seats.

-

Maura, because she is both kind and quite bad at disciplining her child, waits until everyone is huddled on the couches (sitting on towels, because Calla is less kind and refuses to let the newly undead bleed all over her upholstery) and staring at each other in wide-eyed confusion before she speaks.

“Blue, dear?” Blue is sitting on the carpet, trying her best not to swear at Jimi as she cleans the gash in her palm with something that feels and smells sharp.

“Yeah?” _Fuck, that hurt_. Gansey squeezes her other hand sympathetically, looking remarkably put together for somebody who was dead less than twelve hours ago. It’s strange seeing her without glasses.

“Sorry to do this now, but just be aware that you are, um, grounded.” Addie starts laughing at that. It sounds a bit hysterical.

Blue isn’t sure that she cares all that much at the moment, but as a teenager she plays her part by whining. “Why?!”

Calla and Persephone both giggle as Maura tries and fails to look stern. “You know the rules, Blue. No necromancy on a school night.”

-

Addie is known to occasionally indulge in the feeling of smug satisfaction. Whenever she gets a better mark on a test than the classmates who make fun of where she lives and how she talks. When her boss praises her work over the male mechanics at the garage. When she catches Ronnie in the act of looking at her.

But nothing quite beats the vicious pleasure that comes from watching your Latin teacher walk into his classroom to find three of his students sitting at the front of the room, very much alive, and promptly drop his coffee in shock.

He had been waiting for them to leave the police station when Ronnie came to pick them up, Addie already sitting in the passenger seat. They dropped Blue off at home, then turned back. It took them a while to realise that there was a car following them, and it took them until he drove them off the road to realise what was happening.

It’s rather enjoyable watching the blood drain from his face. He licks his lips. Opens his mouth. Closes it. Swallows.

Ronnie leans back in her chair and smirks.

-

They don’t kill Whelk. He kills himself, stumbling drunkenly and hitting his head on the sharp edge of a tombstone.

The police tell the papers that he was probably trying to find some absolution. Soothe his guilty conscience.

Ronnie just thinks that he had a lot of nerve, bleeding all over Noah’s grave after what he did to him.

-

Blue is applying eyeliner, so when a face appears in the mirror behind her, eyes sunken in a waxy face, she nearly stabs herself in the eye. When she whirls around, heart pounding, there’s nobody standing behind her.

-

Ronnie is listening to music with headphones and aggressively not doing anything else when she sees something flicker in the corner of her eye. It’s gone whenever she turns her head, so she doesn’t, drumming her fingers restlessly to the beat and waiting.

She feels a weight dip the mattress.

“Is it any good?” It’s Noah, looking cheerful and pale, perched on the end of the bed and squinting at her curiously. He doesn’t bear much resemblance to the sorry-looking body that they found, with only a smudge in the place of a shattered cheek and concave skull.

He’s a dead thing, but so is she now, so she just shrugs and offers him an ear to listen to. Noah wrinkles his nose at the grinding industrial music, but stays put until someone starts pounding on the bedroom door.

“Ronnie!” It’s Gansey, of course. Only she would be dramatic enough to keep hammering away after the first few seconds. “We need to talk. Addie thinks she saw an apparition at her place.”

Ronnie eyes Noah. “I’m seeing an apparition now.” He sticks out his tongue.

“Spying is rude”, she tells him.

He flops back onto the covers. “Yeah, well, being dead is boring.”

**Author's Note:**

> This vaguely follows the plot of the movie 'All Cheerleaders Die', so warning for: death, murder, gore, drowning, body horror, ritualistic raising of the dead. Unlike the movie, there is no rape or re-murdering of already-murdered teenage girls. Or cannibalism. 
> 
> Also includes slight references to self-harm, child abuse, religion, homophobia/transphobia (less than TRC canon). Contains swearing and brief use of ableist/insensitive language from some characters. I think that's it!
> 
> Title from movie poster.


End file.
